significance that every great moral change in history has been brought about by law-breakers and by resistance to authority.
When the English Nonconformists of two or three centuries ago were fighting governments and breaking laws, they were doing so in defence of a determination to hold doctrines often of a ridiculous kind and productive of a very narrow and bigoted form of religious teaching—a form which, had it obtained the upper hand and secured a general allegiance, might have done the State harm and not good. But, however egregious and even pernicious their doctrine, the justice (and even the value) of the principle for which they contended was not affected thereby. The life of the spirit must take its chance in contact with the life material, and Society must have faith that all true and vital principles will (given a free field and no favour) hold their own against whatever opponents. That is the true faith to which Society is called to-day—but which it certainly does not follow—especially not in war time.
We talk a great deal about liberty, democratic principle, and government by majority; but if those ideals have any real meaning, they mean that—given free trade in ideas and in propaganda on all ethical and moral questions—you have got to trust your community to choose what it thinks good. And to refuse to the general community the means of deciding for itself by the utmost freedom of discussion, is—in a State based on these principles—the most discreditable conduct imaginable.
